Rachael Rome

Lauren

Rachael, let's get started with you introducing yourself — who you are and what you currently do.

Rachael

My name is Rachael Rome, and I'm the Global Director of Behavioral Health Design at HKS. That means I get to cross-pollinate with designers, researchers, and people who are really passionate about increasing access to quality care. I have the fortune of working with incredible people — friends like you, Lauren — and learning from some of the most interesting clinicians out there. We're currently working on projects in different pockets across the country, ranging from ones that have been under construction for about eight months to ones just starting conceptual design.

On a personal note, I'm a mama of two, a wife, a sister, and a curator of fine 90s R&B and hip-hop. But Mom is my favorite title. That's where I am today.

Lauren

What a full plate. Can you talk about how you got here? When did you decide this was the direction you wanted to go, and how did you make it happen?

Rachael

My path has been anything but linear. I started out completely focused on performing arts — singing, dancing, learning instruments, acting. My mom made clear that "fine arts trust" wasn't a viable plan when I was growing up, but I invested in that world for the first 17 or 18 years of my life. As I moved into more competitive spaces around 18, it got harder and harder. Right at the crunch point of college applications, I had a real heart-to-heart with my grandfather, who was an architect. He worked on some fascinating government projects, including with NASA as a campus architect, and he was always quiet and a bit stoic. One morning over waffles, he started revealing this whole other side of himself — pulled out drawings and gave me what felt like a client pitch on why I should consider architecture. I was completely taken aback by his theatrical side. He took me to a meeting with a prospective client, and I was hooked.

Looking back, I had been in the orbit of architecture my whole life without realizing it — I was always drawing as a kid, and I later discovered that someone I went to church with was a practicing principal at HKS, Ron Skaggs, who became one of my early mentors. So I applied to Texas Tech for undergrad, thinking it would be the perfect blend of art and science.

But as I moved into grad school and then practice, I struggled to separate home life from work life. I was making serious compromises with my health, pulling all-nighters, and throwing myself into the chaos cycle that a lot of early professionals do. I thought seriously about leaving the industry — so seriously that I started studying counseling and psychology at night after long work days, considering a pivot into therapy.

Then I hit a fork in the road. I realized I wasn't well-wired to be a therapist — I was really struggling with not absorbing the emotional weight that people were bringing to me. So I chose option three: blend both. I started raising my hand for the less glamorous projects with a psychiatric focus, and over time found this unique place in the Venn diagram of architecture and behavioral health — speaking the clinical language, understanding symptomatic presentations within environments, knowing de-escalation approaches across different diagnoses, and bridging communication between clinicians and architects. That's how I ended up here, and now I get to push codes and regulations toward more empathy, because so many of them are still remnants of more archaic clinical practices. That work genuinely excites me. 

Lauren

One of the reasons I started this podcast is because I feel like, as a young professional, you're told there's one straight trajectory you have to commit to. And now, as a 40-year-old woman, I realize that's not what's happening at all — the women doing phenomenal work made their own paths. Do you have tips on navigating your desires alongside career availability? Any internal work you did along the way?

Rachael

I feel like everyone I consider a friend or acquaintance has been a mentor to me. My path really happened because I was willing to sit with discomfort even when I didn't want to be there. When you're starting out, you have hopes and plans and a very detailed picture in your mind of what a certain move or transition is going to look like — especially for creative people, the details keep accumulating. But I think we don't give enough honor to the discomfort and the painful lessons learned. They all serve a purpose. They inform which direction you take and shape the final product.

For people who are trying to map out their careers, my recommendation is: keep an open mind, really listen to people in your circle and outside of it — especially people who don't think like you or share your experiences. Diversity of perspective is such a gift. And get comfortable with the uncomfortable work. That's where the growth actually lives.

Lauren

What problem do you solve? You touched on it, but can you elaborate on the specific gaps within behavioral health design?

Rachael

If I were to boil it down, the big problem I solve is identifying the smaller problems — finding all the gaps that exist and working to close them or bring them closer together. Some gaps live in a healthy difference; others genuinely don't serve our society, our patients, or their families. Architecture is one voice in a massive orchestra, and I enjoy being a connector who brings the parts into collaboration.

In behavioral health specifically, we're still dealing with enormous stigma and environments that feel deeply institutional. We're making headway, but the market constraints — costs, labor shortages, all of it — compound into what we can actually do with the built environment. Our studio's rallying cry is to do excellent work with people we enjoy and trust, because that's what gets you to pursue a greater depth of collaboration — with manufacturers, with legislators looking upstream of the project — to truly serve our clients and, beyond them, our neighbors and families.

So the work is identifying all the holes, and then filling them with things that are genuinely good.

Lauren

If you had a magic wand and every behavioral health facility could have one component — regardless of budget or constraints — what would it be?

Rachael

Sensory labs, or sensory spaces. We've seen a lot of investment in what's called "positive distraction" — a TV, a painting, an interesting light fixture — but what I think we're really seeing in behavioral health right now is the downstream effect of just how much stimulation we're all absorbing every day. Between answering messages across a dozen platforms for work and home, constant advertising, and general noise, the work being done to develop our understanding of sensory response is fascinating and necessary.

We have two projects currently in construction with really robust sensory programs that address both positive and active sensory disorders — so they're not designed for a single use case, but respond to specific symptomatic presentations. For example, a patient struggling with PTSD or a sensory processing disorder might find sound triggering to the point where a normative environment like a stadium or concert is overwhelming. These sensory labs help desensitize them gradually over time, so they can eventually experience something as joyful as a ball game or a live show.

At its core, I'm trying to guide people back to joy — to enjoying life, to enjoying the everyday. Helping someone get to a place where they can go to a concert and have the best time of their life? That's what this work is for. We have to fix that.

Lauren

How can the system better support women — and I mean the system broadly: the workplace, the home environment, the ecosystem at large. And how can it support all the hats we wear — not just as women, but as moms, caretakers, wives?

Rachael

At the core of all my answers to that question is this: recognizing that ambition and empathy are not opposites — they're allies. Too often, women are expected to prove their strength by minimizing their humanity. But humanity is precisely what makes us effective leaders. The systems that honor flexibility, mentorship, soft skills, and equity aren't just checking a compliance box — they're the ones where women actually thrive.

When I was starting out, I saw fierce project architects who knew every system, every detail, inside and out. I was inspired by them. But as I observed more closely, the personal compromises some of them were making were not ones I wanted to make. I wanted a house full of children, a husband I love, time in my community giving back. I had a really hard time finding a role model who had all of that, because the unspoken message in our industry has long been that 100% work and 100% family can't coexist. That math doesn't work, and the mask it requires doesn't support success.

Better support looks like real flexibility — someone needs to pick up their kids? That's not a failure. Scaling back travel so someone can plan around their family's needs? That's smart retention. The solution isn't one policy applied universally; it's iterative. It's asking, what does a healthy work-life balance look like for this specific person right now?

I'll say this too: I've been really impressed by the newer generation entering architecture firms over the last five years. They have challenged the way things are done — remote work, continuing education, travel norms, all of it — because they could see clearly that it was broken and needed fixing. We apply relentless iteration to improving the quality of our design. We need to do the same for the quality of how we work and how we show up for each other. 

Lauren

What would you tell your younger self — and feel free to extend that to the younger generation just entering the architecture industry?

Rachael

I could write a whole book on this. But what keeps coming back to me is: trust that every detour has meaning, and that uncertainty is often the soil where purpose actually grows.

I've always been a lowercase "a" type — very structured most of the day, but intentional about preserving space for both responsibility and creativity to coexist. I think that's the only way I can truly thrive, and it took me a long time to stop apologizing for that.

There's a quote I love: "Now that you don't have to be perfect, you can be good." We exhaust ourselves chasing perfection, and for what? It's limiting. It reduces us to a simulation of ourselves rather than the real thing. So I would tell my younger self — and anyone just starting out — to let your freak flag fly as much as possible. That's what makes you a person, and ultimately what makes you an extraordinary one.

We're coached from an early age to put a lid on it, to just fit in. And then you grow up having done that and find yourself asking: what do I actually like? Why isn't this working? You get put in a box right away in this industry — what school you went to determines what opportunities are available to you, and suddenly you're existing inside a space someone else created for you. As creatives, that's genuinely hard. But I believe you can look at that box and start to build from there, and each experience teaches you something new.

I've been at HKS for almost seven years now — through the pandemic, through some of the hardest seasons of my personal life — and I've never seen a firm of that size show up with that level of genuine personal support. Finding your tribe is absolutely crucial. What I've tried to build within HKS is a place where that personal connection can thrive — where we invest in knowing each other well enough that we can elevate everyone involved in a project to make the work shine. Someone I worked with at RTKL, Jon Dreama, used to say: "aces in their places." Identify the strengths of every person and find the opportunities where they're just going to knock it out every single time. I fully believe in that model. 

Lauren

That's the end of our questions — but is there anything else you'd like to add, or a topic we didn't quite get to?

Rachael

I'm always daydreaming about the future and ways to connect people in this industry to opportunities. I'd love to see this become a broader national dialogue — not just within AEC, but for women generally, because right now women need as many microphones as possible.

And something worth naming: if you look at the data in architecture since women have really been encouraged to practice, we tend to leave the field at roughly the same stage, collectively. There's a pipeline that looks healthy in academia, and then there's a significant gap in practice. That's a conversation worth digging into — all the threads of the why — and I'd love to see it include the LGBTQ community too, because the factors affecting their experience in this industry are different and just as worthy of attention.

One thing being a mom of a daughter has done is make me sharpen my boundaries — not expand them to accommodate more, but actually hold them. I'm going to be home for dinner. I'm going to do the things I said I'd do. I'm modeling that for her. And the women who came before us — who had to apologize for missing a meeting because their child was sick, who minimized the most meaningful moments of their personal lives so as not to be seen as less committed — I want us to collectively say: that's not what we're doing anymore. Your daughter's birth is not something to apologize for. It's a celebration. We have to stop treating our lives as obstacles to our work, especially when the work we're doing is about healing people. We need to be healing ourselves first.